History according to Newt - Newt Gingrich as a history teacher

Washington Monthly, May, 1995 by Allan J. Lichtman

"I knew when I said I'd teach a 20-hour course after becoming Speaker that some idiot would deliberately distort what I said."

--Newt Gingrich, "Renewing American Civilization"

For a group of 60 Reinhardt College students, Newt Gingrich is painting a vivid picture of the consummate American hero, a man who refused to be cowed by defeat, who persevered through hard work and discipline, who has endured, survived, and triumphed.

His name is Newt Gingrich.

"I was taught very early that persistence defeats all other characteristics in politics," he tells his class. "I couldn't guarantee I was smarter. I couldn't guarantee I was prettier. I couldn't guarantee I was more articulate. I could guarantee I'd get up earlier, I'd work longer, and I'd never stop."

The self-help homilies Newt offers in his 20-hour course would make Tony Robbins blush. Work hard. Set goals. Be persistent. Be disciplined. Each cliche is illustrated with anecdotes from the Speaker's own life. No one can miss the teacher's message: American civilization should be just like me.

Make no mistake: Gingrich is a talented pedagogue. He holds student interest. He breathes life into his subject. It's just the history that trips him up.

The thesis of Gingrich's course is that American history was an uninterrupted continuity of opportunity and progress from colonial times until what he calls the "breakdown" of 1965. If you read the papers, you know what comes next: That's when the elite liberal state, aided by the counterculture, introduced the infections of dependency, bureaucracy, and failure. He's teaching the course in part to balance out the liberal's view of the world. Did you know, for example, that Thomas Edison "is almost never studied in the counterculture because all his values are exactly wrong? He was successful, and he was very work-oriented, he was highly creative."

Gingrich has a point about this country's past. In many ways our society did break apart in the mid-sixties, as individual and group demands superseded the national interest. But Gingrich barely acknowledges that his golden age of opportunity didn't truly shine for anyone but white males before that. He is even more selective in his description of what's gone wrong since. The counterculture didn't cause Watergate, and it certainly didn't set the national tone from 1980 to 1992, when tax changes helped increase the real income of the richest one percent by nearly 74 percent (according to the Economic Policy Institute) while the bottom fifth suffered a 4.4 percent decline. Policies that increased inequity contributed far more to social fragmentation and selfishness than did the liberal movements of the sixties.

Gingrich's fictionalized history makes more sense when you examine his sources. This professor doesn't waste much time on books or documents, unless you count novels and films. This is History Lite (which, admittedly, some students covet). He spends far less time on The Federalist Papers than he does on "The Last of the Mohicans," one of his favorite films:

"Wonderful scene where the American ... is standing there and the British officer says, 'Aren't you going to Fort William Henry?' And he says, 'No, I'm going to Kentucky.' And he says, 'How can you go to Kentucky in the middle of a war?' And he says, 'You face north, turn left and walk. It's west of here.' It's a very American response ... Now, he ends up going to fight. Why? Because of the girl, which is also classically American. It's a very romantic country."

Of the books he does use, you have to wonder whether he has read them recently. He devotes an entire class to the work of Alvin and Heidi Toffler, expounding on Future Shock's theory that a society's familial and economic patterns are shaped by its means of production, whether hunter-gatherer or industrial. He stops there, but according to the Tofflers, the traditional family is as much a dinosaur of the industrial age as is the large bureaucracy. Among the new family forms that they predict will emerge: group marriage, homosexual marriages, polygamy, and serial monogamy. Gingrich doesn't mention that part.

Gingrich's historical selectivity and outright errors are, well, revealing. He manages to get through the entire Civil War without ever mentioning slavery. Of the Declaration of Independence, he says "They originally wrote, 'We are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.'" Property? John Locke, yes. The Declaration of Independence, never.

Not surprisingly, much of Gingrich's course is preoccupied with the history of the welfare state--the "actively destructive" welfare state, that is. He doesn't acknowlege any of the good that government has done over the past 30 years, when federal investments in education, electrification, research, and facilities built Gingrich's modern South.

Instead, Gingrich explains, "The modern welfare state basically says to you: Tell us what kind of victim you are, and we'll tell you how big a check you get ... In the elite culture model, we focus on losers." Perhaps, but does Gingrich then number the people he represents among the losers? His congressional district receives the largest amount of federal funds of any district in America. Newt the teacher may have forgotten this. Newt the politician knows it well.